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Witsieshoek Mountain Lodge (WML) is an 88-bed lodge in the South African section of the Maloti Drakensberg Transfrontier Park World Heritage Site. WML is a community owned lodge, privately operated by Transfrontier Parks Destinations (TFPD). By providing business acumen, market linkages, and securing investment finance TFPD has transformed a dilapidated community owned lodge into a thriving enterprise. It generates meaningful financial returns for the community owners, and also secure full-time employment for local people. Furthermore, the lodge has been independently certified as a sustainable tourism business by Fair Trade Tourism. Information Snyman, S. and Spenceley, A. (2019) Private Sector Tourism in Conservation Areas in Africa, CABI, Chapter 4.3.1, Case study 23: Witsieshoek Mountain Lodge, South Africa, pp 109-111 © CAB International 2021

This case study describes how Phinda Private Game Reserve has evolved over three decades from privately owned land and infrastructure at the outset, to a mixture of community owned land and a joint-venture partnership. The operations have generated substantial benefits for conservation and social benefits for local people over many years. Information Snyman, S. and Spenceley, A. (2019) Private Sector Tourism in Conservation Areas in Africa. CABI, Chapter 4.4.1, Case study 26: Phinda Private Game Reserve, South Africa. pp 119-122 © CAB International 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global human health crisis that is deeply intertwined with the global biodiversity crisis. It originated when a zoonotic virus spilled over from wild animals to humans. Viruses can spread easily in disturbed ecosystems, and with increasing contact between humans and wildlife the risk of contagion grows. Conservation is crucial to reduce the risks of future pandemics, but the current pandemic also impacts on conservation in many ways. In this Briefing Paper we suggest strategies to alleviate the pandemic's adverse effects on conservation in the Global South. Many zoonoses originate there, and livelihoods are strongly dependent on natural resources. The paper considers the pandemic's overarching economic implica-tions for protected and other conserved areas, and specific ramifications for the tourism and wildlife trade sectors, which are closely related to these areas. As economies shrink, natural resources come under pressure from various sides. Financial resources are reallocated from the conservation to the health sector, countries decrease environmental protection standards to boost economic recovery, and poor people in rural regions resort to protected wild resources as a subsistence strategy. Together, these trends speed up the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services and create supportive conditions for the emergence of zoonotic disease and the undermining of livelihoods. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, nature-based tourism was a multi-billion dollar industry, and the temporary breakdown in tourism is having both positive and negative impacts on sustainable development. On the negative side, many people employed in tourism have lost their jobs and livelihoods, and a key source of funding for management of protected areas has been depleted. On the positive side, a temporary decline in tourism has given nature time to recover, and a drop in international flights has lowered global carbon emissions from air travel. The need for the industry to plan its post-COVID outlook offers a chance to promote more community-driven tourism to support inclusion of local people. Wildlife trade - a major spreader of zoonotic viruses - has been banned in response to the pandemic in some countries. Yet social safeguards for local communities dependent on protein from wild animals are still largely missing. Our recommendations to address these challenges are that conservation must remain high on the international agenda, especially in the midst of a global health crisis that could quickly repeat itself if ecosystem destruction continues at the current pace. Environmental legislation must be upheld and funding made available for sustainable livelihoods. The resurgence of nature-based tourism should be supported because of its potential to generate conservation funding and income for local communities. In the meantime, the tourism industry should work on further reducing its environmental footprint and improving community self-determination. Bans on wildlife trade need to be designed in ways that do not undermine communities' need for sources of protein.

58 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, The World Economic Forum now ranks biodiversity loss as a top-five risk to the global economy, and the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework proposes an expansion of conservation areas to 30% of the earth’s surface by 2030 (hereafter the “30% target”), using protected areas (PAs) and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs). - Two immediate concerns are how much a 30% target might cost and whether it will cause economic losses to the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors. - Conservation areas also generate economic benefits (e.g. revenue from nature tourism and ecosystem services), making PAs/Nature an economic sector in their own right. - If some economic sectors benefit but others experience a loss, high-level policy makers need to know the net impact on the wider economy, as well as on individual sectors. [...], A. Waldron, K. Nakamura, J. Sze, T. Vilela, A. Escobedo, P. Negret Torres, R. Button, K. Swinnerton, A. Toledo, P. Madgwick, N. Mukherjee were supported by National Geographic and the Resources Legacy Fund. V. Christensen was supported by NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2019-04901. M. Coll and J. Steenbeek were supported by EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 817578 (TRIATLAS). D. Leclere was supported by TradeHub UKRI CGRF project. R. Heneghan was supported by Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Acciones de Programacion Conjunta Internacional (PCIN-2017-115). M. di Marco was supported by MIUR Rita Levi Montalcini programme. A. Fernandez-Llamazares was supported by Academy of Finland (grant nr. 311176). S. Fujimori and T. Hawegawa were supported by The Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-2002) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan and the Sumitomo Foundation. V. Heikinheimo was supported by Kone Foundation, Social Media for Conservation project. K. Scherrer was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 682602. U. Rashid Sumaila acknowledges the OceanCanada Partnership, which funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). T. Toivonen was supported by Osk. Huttunen Foundation & Clare Hall college, Cambridge. W. Wu was supported by The Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-2002) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan. Z. Yuchen was supported by a Ministry of Education of Singapore Research Scholarship Block (RSB) Research Fellowship